Magical March at Minerva University (2024)
Disney World Orlando, NBA and ice hockey, four cornerstone courses, and 200 lifelong friends
PS. I recently joined the brilliant ‘Humans of Minerva’ podcast as the first M27 host. To introduce me to all the listeners, the podcast’s co-founder, Julia Ip, recorded an episode with me as the guest. It was a deep and heartfelt conversation which I would love to share with all my readers here!
Link:
Keep a close watch on this podcast, because I will shortly begin recording amazing episodes with my Minerva M27 classmates, whose life stories, experiences, and accomplishments are nothing short of spectacular! Stay tuned for more, and in the meanwhile, follow the ‘Humans of Minerva’ podcast on social media, Apple podcasts and Spotify!
Now, back to the newsletter…..
Disney World Orlando
An age-old childhood dream of mine came true when I spent a whopping 10 days in Disney World and Universal Studios Orlando during spring break! I was immediately transported back to my 8-year-old self who used to believe in ghosts and monsters and Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and……in dreams more generally. Day after day in the theme parks, under the bright sun, walking a minimum of 15 km a day, I felt exhausted but exhilarated the entire time! The rush of laughter, bright colours, joy, and love in the air hit me powerfully after having spent months in a city of concrete, grey, black, serious faces, and a lonely isolation which sometimes strikes you as hard as SF’s windy breeze – and I’m not just talking about San Francisco, this applies more broadly to so many of our urban metropolises today.
The power of the imagination is incredible – it can make mountains out of molehills, either for our sweetest dreams or even our darkest nightmares. The manifestations of the mind’s creative thought in the real world can stir hearts and souls, and Disney World is a testament to that. It truly is a magical place, nearly isolated from reality, a place where I found a gentle smile that had gone missing during many weeks of academic stress and the anxieties of ‘adulting’.
Creativity is a skill that differentiates the innovators from the followers – in art, science, technology, politics, business, you name the industry. The excitement of having and then pursuing an idea which you have reason to believe nobody else in the world has ever had before gives a sense of thrill and jubilation that my words would do no justice to. I believe that creativity is somewhat innate, somewhat a natural talent which people are blessed with to varying degree. But, it is a skill and a skill can at least partially be taught and trained. I am excited to see the most innovative leaders in education and professional development working on this challenging question of ‘How can we teach at least the skills, mindsets and tools which can empower a person to stimulate their creative process and systematically create opportunities and safe spaces for creative revelations?’
Creativity may very well be one of the few things that differentiates a human being in an age of Artificial General Intelligence, and we better start refining that toolbox starting today. The tools are already there, because every one of us was once a child. Now it’s time to bring that child out into the world and seriously, stop taking ourselves so seriously.
Sports season in San Francisco – NBA and Ice Hockey
I had the honour of watching a live NBA and Ice Hockey game this month, and they were spectacular! Massive and grand indoor stadiums, passionate crowds, fierce rivalries, and the power of sport to truly unite us all, even if against a temporary common enemy in the form of the opposition team. And watching a game with dear friends was all the more exciting, because during those times when we let our emotions loose and set ourselves free next to the people we love, is when special memories are created.
Sport truly has the power to unite divided peoples and teach the younger generation important life skills that transfer way beyond the track and field. I have been fascinated by my friend and Minerva classmate, Braydon Rutherford from South Africa, who is part of the ‘Peace Players’ community, an organization which aims to build a global network of young leaders who create a more peaceful and equitable world, entirely through sport. Braydon has taught basketball to children from Israel and Palestine, in Northern Ireland, and even his home country of South Africa, where he has worked with children from divided communities, that have been fighting against each other for generations. Through the medium of basketball, he has taught these children how to cooperate, handle conflict, play a fair game, work together toward a common goal, and that the team is stronger than the individual. Just through a simple ball and a hoop. As an indoor young generation, it is imperative that we step outside the comfort of our rooms and gadgets and engage in sport, not just for our physical health, but for building our own character, deepening our relationships with other human beings, and teaching us crucial life lessons subtly but surely, as we continue to master the game.
Academics at Minerva – Cornerstone Courses
HC highlights
1) Complex Systems – #negotiate
We engage in daily negotiations more often than we realize. The stakes are always high, be it just preserving a personal relationship, advancing our careers, or influencing city-wide or national policy making. Despite the high stakes, most of us have never been formally taught the appropriate strategies, tools and mindsets that have proven to lead to more successful and harmonious outcomes in a negotiation. Why?
Real-world examples:
· BATNA – Best alternative to a negotiated agreement. This is your greatest source of strength, influence and the best reality check which allows you to decide when to stay firm on your priorities and eventually even when to walk away from a negotiation. When fiercely demanding a salary hike, this could be your second-best job offer from another company. When building a factory in a new location becomes difficult due to protests from locals, this is the second-best location option you have to build that same factory. When asking your parents for more pocket money, this is the second-best option of asking your grandparents or uncle/aunt for that same extra pocket money. A realistic understanding of our second-best option is the best reality check, because sometimes even a poorly negotiated agreement is far superior to our alternatives, and sometimes even a well negotiated agreement won’t cut it because our second-best option is nearly equally desirable. Your BATNA tells you when to walk away from the negotiation, when to give in, and when to stay firm. It’s a superpower, truly.
· Common ground – Also called the Zone of Possible Interest (ZOPA). And this need not just be monetary common ground, ie. a price point at which a buyer and seller can close a deal. When 2 parties seem to be directly in opposition to each other and think they are playing a zero-sum game, identifying areas of interest-based common ground is vital to advancing the discussion. The buyer and seller of a house who can’t agree on a price could at least make progress by agreeing on their shared emotional sentiment to protect the architectural heritage of the building. A mother and father whose parenting styles clash could pave the way forward by agreeing on the common interest of doing what is best for the child’s emotional and mental well-being. Senior executives in a company debating on specific strategies to choose could find areas of common value like improving brand image or increasing sales revenue. Finding common ground helps parties finally realize that they do share common values and end goals in the negotiation, which can become a place of synergy, harmony, and an opportunity to cooperate, with the powerful realization that my win is not always your loss.
· Separate people from the problem. Many of our poorly handled negotiations disturbed or broke our personal and professional relationships because we forgot that majorly, our issue was with the other person’s work/position/ideology/strategy, and not directly with the person himself. In any group project setting at school, home or in the workplace, when we can learn to distance people from problems, we will be able to give even greater constructive criticism and be very candid about our problems with a proposal, knowing full well the party on the other side will not take it as a personal attack, because outside of this negotiation, we are friends.
2) Multimodal Communications – #multimedia
The powerful combination of different mediums of art and artists with unique specializations can create highly engaging and moving experiences that are both immersive and interactive. On the other hand, creating a work of multimedia is a fine balance between different mediums of art and things can go downhill quickly when different art forms begin to overpower, disagree with and undermine each other’s message.
Real–world examples:
· Critiquing multimedia in the outside world: In our audio-visual world, one medium can sometimes feel dull and boring. We love watching content that combines music, videography, theatre, written text, and background narration. Isn’t that what makes our Instagram reels so engaging and addictive? It is interesting to analyze multimedia in our daily lives, in advertisements, films, interactive museum exhibits, social media posts, Broadway shows, even music videos, and try to dive deeper into why a particular multimedia piece was effective or not. The key principle is that the most effective multimedia pieces become more than the sum of their parts where the music complements and enhances the background narration, which enhances the visuals, which enhance the written text and so on. On the other hand, multimedia pieces that are overwhelming, confusing, or boring involve different medium elements competing with each other for attention, and deviating from the main message.
· Teamwork makes the dream work –It takes a team of talented artists with unique specializations to cooperate and merge their talents to create stunning works of multimedia. So if creating multimedia seems too daunting for you, either for your personal life, in the workplace, for a personal project, or just as a side hobby, I’d encourage you to find an area of art you can specialize in and then collaborate with others whose skillset complements yours, because the synergy will surely create a multimedia work that is way beyond the sum of your individual areas of talent and expertise. While you specialize in script writing, maybe your father is the musician, your first cousin the talented photographer, and your brilliant younger sister, the sound engineer – a family production!
· Virtual Reality and the Metaverse: Having thoroughly enjoyed my 30-minute free demo of the Apple Vision Pro headset in San Francisco, I began to ponder why exactly Virtual Reality was in such ‘hot’ demand from customers worldwide. Two major contributing factors are immersiveness and interactivity. The immersiveness of the VR experience involves the complex combination of medium elements like sound, visuals, narration, written text, which some day, hope to engage all 5 senses, even touch and taste, to be on par with a real-world experience. Furthermore, a major untapped power of multimedia is having audiences interact with an art piece – think interactive or playback theatre. What if your individual actions could influence the ending of Dune 2 or Oppenheimer? The power of the Metaverse lies in allowing audiences to weave their own narrative alongside the characters, giving them autonomy and power to shape the story and make it their own. The balance then needs to be struck between giving audiences the freedom and range of choices to feel fully in control of the narrative while also taking them along a general narrative path that the ‘experience creator’ would like the audience to go through. We truly live in interesting times!
Student spotlights
Jacopo Minniti (Italy)
As a declared AI and mathematics double major at Minerva University, you still insist that philosophy is your life’s greatest passion. How has your understanding of philosophy matured over the years?
I am blessed and grateful to have grown up in a household with more books than kitchen utensils. Now that’s a bold claim to make, especially for an Italian household with plenty of pots, pans, and knives! My father loves philosophy, and my mother enjoys literature, so in a sense, studying philosophy is my way of carrying on this family legacy. I believe deeply in a quote by Emil Cioran, a Romanian philosopher who states that ‘Most of philosophy is just a play of clowns’. It can be very deluding, an over-complicated mask for nothing, and complicated jargon to put a blanket over a superficial field of knowledge. But, Cioran also noted that ‘There are some hidden gems amidst all the mess’. I disagree with many philosophers, but that dissent helps me uncover new truths as I attempt to dispute their arguments. It helps me over-complicate and over-think nearly every decision in my daily life.
Aristotle famously said that ‘Philosophy is mostly useless. But because it is useless, it’s probably the most human thing we have’. Our ability to ponder deeply about questions that may very well appear useless to all other species on planet Earth like the nature of human existence, ethics and morals, and our purpose on this planet, is what makes us deeply human.
You aren’t just a deep thinker but also a practical ‘doer’. Philosophy and technology are a potent mix. Tell us about your personal passion project, ‘Better than yesterday’.
I have spent significant time volunteering during middle and high school, at soup kitchens, schools, hospitals, community events, and fundraisers. I was fortunate to be mentored by educators who taught me ‘how much you can help yourself just by helping others’ and how much a single individual can impact society by harnessing the potential of technology. I am currently developing both the front and back end of a social network for volunteering to build a greater sense of civic engagement and shared community values among the younger generation. Essentially, ‘an Instagram for social volunteering and community service’.
I would like to see young people addicted not only to reels and shorts but also to positively shaping their communities by solving real-world problems that impact everybody. The platform would be ideal for efficiently organizing community events, building non-profit organizations, and generally encouraging the youth with inspiring examples of young changemakers in their own neighbourhoods. I have a solid MVP ready to deploy for the first phase of testing and user feedback, which would help me further refine the features and user experience of my platform, before hopefully, launching it to the public.
A true hacker’s mindset! Build, test, refine and repeat. In fact, you’ve had some spotlight recently in the Minerva community when your team won the NASA space apps hackathon. If it’s not highly classified information, would you mind telling us about the award-winning idea you pitched, and reflections from the entire experience?
Nothing is highly classified for you, Arya. Destructive wildfires are a significant threat to human life in many parts of the world, including California. The challenge begins when wildfires destroy network cables, thus weakening the internet connection of the entire area, with panicked locals unaware of which direction to head in as a safe zone, away from the flames, because their can’t access life-saving data.
Our idea was to use mesh networks and connect them to streetlights without the internet. Subsequently, when a wildfire is ravaging an area, all the nearby streetlights will turn on and off systematically, with the arrow of the light guiding people toward the nearest safe zone. A solution that works with zero internet connection and the universally recognized symbol of the streetlight, which has the power to save lives.
The experience was spectacular. It was a huge confidence booster because this was my first hackathon in the city, and I forged deep personal connections with a team of brilliant Minerva students, all passionate to hopefully take this project forward in the future and make tangible impact.
My key takeaways from the entire experience would be:
· Time constraints are very stressful but give birth to legendary ideas.
· You can’t lose in a hackathon, you can only win. Losing means you are exactly at the same point in your life as when you entered the hackathon, but probably with some new insights, connections and inspiring ideas. So even to the non-technical people out there, there is absolutely no harm in giving it a shot. You won’t regret the experience. And you just might come back home with some prize money, or better yet, funding for your exciting idea!
Mulyn Kim (Bay area local)
For all those whose lives have been transformed by the New York Times best-selling book, ‘Just Work’, you can thank Mulyn because she was a social media intern for Kim Scott and her posts just might be the way you first heard about this book. How was the entire experience?
One of my mother’s co-workers at Google is Kim Scott’s husband. I met Kim Scott at a casual company dinner and passionately engaged her in conversation about her writing process and upcoming book. As a fiction writer myself, I knew there was much to be learnt from such a reputed non-fiction writer, so I cautiously offered to work for her for free and help her with the social media marketing of all her works. Kim knew she could use a helping hand at no extra cost, and it was a win-win deal. I drafted social media posts for various platforms to chronologically advertise different sections and snippets of her latest, bestselling book, ‘Just work’. I even expanded my role to help her with editing her sci-fi novel that she plans on releasing soon, with the current working title of ‘The cookie monster’. She sought my opinion and feedback at multiple points during the writing process because her main characters were teenagers, and hence she wanted an 18-year-old’s perspective on how authentic the conversations and inner thoughts of the characters felt to me as a teenage reader.
This awe-inspiring journey led me to admire all professional writers and artists, at all levels of success and fame, because ‘How can they stick so passionately to one idea for so many frustrating, difficult years without ever giving up, mostly clueless about how their audiences will receive their work?’.
Driven by inspiration and great mentorship, you then attempted to test the above question on yourself. Talk to us about the fictional novel you’re currently working on.
I will probably never be a full-time author but one of the items on my bucket list is to publish a novel once in my life.
You should know that most of the time, I write just for the sake of writing. I have absolutely no clue where the story will go. As I draft a scene, it plays out vividly in my mind, as if my characters are tugging at my clothes and trying to take me on a journey, with myself vigorously just putting pen to paper and typing out the movie playing in my mind, before it zips past me.
So, on a warm summer day like any other, I put pen to paper and began to write the scene that played out in my head. It turned out so well that I decided then and there that this would be the prologue for my first novel.
My story’s protagonist is a girl who lost her parents at a young age, and thus had to be extremely tough and independent, never letting her guard down, fighting just to survive. She is neither a hero nor a villain – somewhere in between, like a shade of grey. Constructing her character really challenged my notion of right and wrong and who decides what’s moral or not. This girl is selfish, sometimes violent, and downright rude, but how else can she fend for herself, all alone in a dangerous world? The girl finds an unlikely gang of friends and attempts to save a poor soul who is captured by the overarching villain of the tale, on a physical and metaphorical journey, with the underlying themes of coming-of-age, justice, adventure, community and the fine line between good vs evil.
At this stage, finishing the novel will be my biggest test – going from 80 to 100%. I get so attached to my characters that I don’t want the story to ever end, hence so much of my past writing has remained unfinished and unpublished. I need to let go of my characters and learn to say goodbye so that they can live on in the hearts and minds of all those readers who encounter my story. Until then, fingers crossed, and hopefully I’ll have good news regarding publication very soon!
I admire how you go super deep into the inner psyche and personality development of all your characters. Psychology and neuroscience seem to be a deep passion. Enlighten us about your opportunity to work with a Stanford graduate student and conduct psychological research with the Cambridge Center for International Research.
Yes! I worked with a post-doc student from Stanford and assisted with a project she was pursuing. More specifically, I helped her design the outline for an experimental study and subsequent research paper to investigate how different colours can impact the speed of human decision-making. Even as a high school student with limited background in psychology, neuroscience and conducting research, I still brought a fresh perspective to the table and was able to give her novel insights about how a potential participant in her study would experience it, and what potential flaws and confusions might arise. I was trained by her for 8 weeks in cognitive neuroscience concepts and methods/tools for conducting experimental psychological research, which was a wonderful learning opportunity.
My biggest takeaway would be the sheer amount of thought, planning and ethical considerations that go into designing a ‘simple’ research study – there are so many rounds of feedback, approvals, ethical review boards which must approve your study design before you can conduct it.
Our findings from the study indicated that warm, vibrant colours like red, orange, and yellow trigger your brain to process information and make decisions faster compared to duller, less vibrant colours like black, navy blue, brown, and grey. Our study design involved showing viewers a clip with either vibrant or dull colours and then asking them a series of simple questions afterwards, to measure the speed of impulsive answering. One simple real-world application of these findings would be for teachers to use brighter colours in their teaching materials (worksheets, videos, presentations) to encourage students in the classroom to pay closer attention, minimize distractions while learning, and help students process information faster and participate more enthusiastically in class.
Your deepened understanding of human psychology and cognition overall then transferred to improve your effectiveness as a member of ‘Say Smiles’. What’s the story behind the sweet name of this organization?
‘Say Smiles’ is a Bay Area non-profit, established during the quarantine. The need arose when the founders noticed so many seniors in senior homes feeling extremely lonely, isolated, anxious, and depressed during quarantine because they were separated from family and had to stay indoors all the time because they were the most vulnerable population to the virus. Thus, at ‘Say Smiles’ we took a simple step toward adding some joy, excitement and human connection to the lives of all our seniors.
All volunteers became pen pals with multiple seniors in a senior home, and we would exchange letters on a bi-weekly basis, just trying to learn more about each other and form a connection – we would chat about our past, our future, how we were dealing with the pandemic, and how we were feeling during this difficult time. I was amazed to learn about the life journeys of all these men and women who had lived through events that I could only ever read about in my history books. Everyone has a story to share, but the world desperately needs more patient ears that can just sit silent and listen.
Having lived with my grandparents my entire life, I realized I had never sat them down and truly listened to their life story, and so the remainder of my quarantine was the opportunity I took to reconnect with them and truly listen.
Book of the month
Movie of the month
Poem of the month
Adventure sports
When you realize
Way too late into the experience
That you are a crazy idiotic fool
For ever attempting such a thing
And thinking you could make it out alive
Because you know you will find a way to
Make a mistake
And tumble to your death
When you curse yourself a thousand times
For ever wanting this adrenaline rush
But at the very end of the experience
After 5 minutes that felt more like
5,001 lifetimes
You are a little dazed
Breathless
Shaken
Confused
But
Still
Alive
Thrilled, victorious,
Unafraid to scream out loud
At the top of your lungs
Because you have never felt so blissfully alive
Ready to take on the world
Because once you’ve survived this,
Truly,
What can’t you accomplish in life,
Once you just set your mind to it?
When you swallow your fear
And take a leap of faith
Into the ‘scary’ abyss
Of endless possibility
and opportunity
You move on to the next adventure sport
And the crazy cycle begins all over again
Wow! That was long. Thank you for being patient with me and reading (or skimming) to the end.
Please subscribe to my monthly newsletter if you would like to stay updated with my monthly adventures as I travel to 6 global cities (San Francisco, Taipei, Seoul, Buenos Aires, Hyderabad, and Berlin) over the next 4 years with Minerva University. Until then, Au revoir!